Fintech News: September 16th, 2016

In chess, a Centaur is a half-human, half-machine that is better than either the human or the computer alone. Now, the centaur is coming to financial planning. Human advisors aren’t going out of business; they’re using artificial intelligence to do the dirty work. By using AI to analyze huge troughs of data, advisors buy themselves more time for the emotional side of financial planning: understanding their client’s story, moods, fears, goals and dreams.

A new report from Forrester agrees that bot technology is still too rudimentary for the mass market. It urges banks to hold off for a few years before offering a banking bot to their customers. In the mean time, they should start exploring APIs and platform improvements in preparation for the eventual use of customer-facing bots.

Ant Financial, the fintech arm of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, raised eyebrows this week by acquiring EyeVerify, a US-based cybersecurity startup. EyeVerify’s core product is a technology that uses a smartphone’s front-facing camera to verify a user’s identity. Ant Financial has repeatedly denied plans to expand into the US market; they will use the EyeVerify product in their own products as an extra line of defense.